Alisa Scharf is Chief AI Officer at Seer Interactive, where she leads how the firm brings generative search, AI consulting, and internal AI tooling into client and team work. She has been in SEO since 2010, joined Seer in 2012, and still ties search programs to measurable business outcomes beyond traffic.
From Temple University to Seer
Scharf holds a B.A. in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and still talks about data as raw material for a story. She entered SEO in 2010 and joined Seer Interactive in 2012, then spent more than a decade building and scaling search teams through several eras of digital marketing.
Her titles inside Seer tracked that shift: SEO leadership, then VP of SEO and Generative AI, then VP of AI and Innovation, then Chief AI Officer. Seer's team page describes her specialty as connecting SEO to broader business outcomes so clients capture more than traffic. She lives in Collingswood, New Jersey, and lists Crisis Text Line among her community work.
Brand Accuracy in AI Answers
On the No Hacks podcast she argues that many brands chase AI visibility backwards. Her team's first move is a brand accuracy audit: run factual prompts about founding date, location, products, and competitors across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, then fix what the models get wrong on pages the brand controls before spending on competitive category terms.
Seer ran the audit on itself and found models still tied the agency to a San Diego office it no longer has, and failed to credit proprietary data infrastructure that never appeared clearly on Seer's own site. In her framing, offense wins games and defense wins championships: correcting what models already believe often beats swinging for "best X for Y" queries a brand does not yet deserve.
Seer's Citation Research
Scharf's public research posture is blunt about metrics. A Seer study of more than 15,000 prompts across half a million pages found that pages earning the most ChatGPT citations often sat in a mid domain-authority band, not the high-authority names legacy SEO tools reward. She treats citations as closer to a page-two Google ranking than to a closed deal: useful as a leading signal, volatile month to month, and incomplete as a business outcome.
A related Seer study led by colleague Sani Vasquez found models recommend a specific brand only about 2.3% of the time. Scharf reads that number as a competitive benchmark and tells brands to watch direct traffic, branded search, and brand recognition alongside AI referral dashboards. She also separates AI-search visibility from agent readiness: getting cited in an answer is different from getting an agent to buy, book, or provision on a customer's behalf.
AI Tools for Seer's Staff
Her work at Seer spans client methodology and internal enablement. Public materials credit her with pioneering systems that help every team member experiment with and apply AI responsibly, and she speaks on AI-driven search and executive communication in SEO.
She frames the work as storytelling with data: decide what is objectively true about the brand, complete Organization schema, and make sure models can find that record.